-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 01/06/2013 05:38 AM, Walid wrote: > Dear All, > > At work we are starting to evaluate Configuration management to be > used to manage several diverse hpc clusters, and their diverse node > types. I wanted to see what are other admins, and HPC users > experience like, the ones that we will start evaluating are > CFEngine3, Puppet, Chef, Saltstack, ansible, and blueprint. there > might other products that we need to evluate in partnership such as > Foreman, spacewalk, ..etc. > > I would like to hear from you if you did evaluate such tools, or > using one, or have a different strategy in keeping and maintaining > configurations.
CFengine probably isn't a bad choice - going with something that's well-tested and -used is helpful because it's a lot easier to get recipes for what you need to do. The one on the list I can absolutely recommend against is Spacewalk - we use RHN Satellite (the commercial version of Spacewalk) and it is easily the worst configuration management system I have ever seen. <rant> Here's some problems: 1. It's slow - everything you do has to go through Jabber, Tomcat, Oracle, and god knows what else. Trying to schedule an action on hundreds of systems can take minutes to accomplish, degrading performance for everyone else. 2. It's unreliable - it can take multiple attempts to actually get a command scheduled. 3. Its configuration file management is byzantine - rather than letting you combined fragments of configuration files together, you have to include whole files into channels, which are then applied in some order to each individual system. Good luck trying to figure out which systems have which order after the fact, or trying to update the order in some predictable fashion. 4. Its channel management is slow and opaque - if you upload a new package into Satellite, it has to rebuild its indices before it's available to client systems. When this starts and when this finishes is totally invisible to you, though, so you have no idea when the package is actually ready to be installed. 5. Support is atrocious - Even with a paid support contract, we've had pretty bad experiences. We've encountered serious bugs and deficiencies in Satellite that have taken years to correct. I could go on but I think that's sufficient. </rant> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with undefined - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlDpyKgACgkQsc4yyULgN4bkDQCgitajZe4fj+O0be1/eNcBwKhU FnIAn2BWIWHlSvKhryo+2+M2Q+Do7RTf =GXKx -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
